Thomas Flanagan became famous as the author of a trilogy of novels, starting with The Year of the French, about Ireland from the rebellion of 1798 to the civil war of the 1920s. But the novelist who began by reimagining the mental and physical world of eighteenth-century County Mayo had long been immersing himself, as a scholar, essayist, and reviewer, in the literature and history of his ancestral land.

In the nonfiction writings collected here, many of them unpublished in his lifetime, Flanagan brings what Christopher Cahill calls his “keen eye and strong gaze and sharp tongue” to reassessments of key figures of Irish culture. They range from Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, through W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Collins, to contemporaries and friends like Brian Moore and Frank O—Connor, and American Irish like the Molly Maguires and the director John Ford.

Flanagan probes the tragically intertwined origins of celebrity and literary modernism in the careers of Irish-American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O—Neill, and John O—Hara. He reflects on what his own novels have taught him about the possibilities of historical fiction. And his thoughts on Irish-American identity sum up the long-pondered mixture of experience and scrutiny he brought to his heritage.

Witty, lively, and learned, this collection reveals that Thomas Flanagan was not only as a master of the historical novel but a writer who meditated broadly and deeply on the Ireland he once described as “a complex, profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and some dark.”

Quotes

A handsome collection of essays…skillfully bonded together to form a cohesive examination of what is recognized as an Irish literary tradition…Scholarly yes, but never dull…Flanagan writes for readers, not for scholars—he’s on our side…This is critical writing of the highest order, illuminating and exact.— The Leeds Guide

Flanagan’s essays are unencumbered by the fashionable critical baggage—Theory, Post-Structuralism, whatever you’re having yourself—that strives to remove literature from our pleasures and place it among our duties…it’s the desire to share both his enthusiasms and his reasons for them that makes him such a companionable critic…Books, of course, were his other friends, and he conveys his love of them in this welcome volume.— Irish Independent

A book testifying to Flanagan’s immense gifts…a superb cornucopia of offerings on subjects from Mary McCarthy to the Molly Maguires.— Sunday Business Post (Irish)

…a superb collection of Flanagan’s critical work….Cahill has done an exemplary service tracking down previously unpublished work and in editing There You Are into a model collection with sections devoted to American writers and directors—the essay on John Ford should not be missed—Irish writers, Irish and Irish American history and historical fiction and personal essays…Taken as a whole, these pieces—many of them stunningly concise and written for newspapers and other popular venues—are a sign of hope for anybody who has begun to doubt that serious and accessible criticism can yet play a role in our wider popular culture.— Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times

Fortunately, the NYRB press has just collected his articles for The New York Review of Books, as well as many other pieces, in a volume entitled There You Are…in these essays, which the city’s literary crowd devoured over the course of several decades, Flanagan displays his wit and flash in pieces on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara and Mary McCarthy.— Murray Sperber, The New York Observer

About the authors

Thomas Flanagan (1923–2002), the grandson of Irish immigrants, grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he ran the school newspaper with his friend Truman Capote. Flanagan attended Amherst College (with a two-year hiatus to serve in the Pacific Fleet) and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied under Lionel Trilling while also writing stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In 1959, he published an important scholarly work, The Irish Novelists, 1800 to 1850, and the next year he moved to Berkeley, where he was to teach English and Irish literature at the University of California for many years. In 1978 he took up a post at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, from which he retired in 1996. Flanagan and his wife Jean made annual trips to Ireland, where he struck up friendships with many writers, including Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney, whom he in turn helped bring to the United States. His intimate knowledge of Ireland’s history and literature also helped to inspire his trilogy of historical novels, starting with The Year of the French (1979, winner of the National Critics’ Circle award for fiction) and continuing with The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994). Flanagan was a frequent contributor to many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Kenyon Review. A collection of his essays, There You Are: Writing on Irish and American Literature and History, is also published by New York Review Books.

Christopher Cahill is the author of Perfection, a novel, and editor of Gather Round Me: The Best of Irish Popular Poetry. He edits The Recorder, the journal of The American Irish Historical Society, and is the executive director of the McCabe Fellowship Exchange Program at The John Jay College of Criminal Justice.